Multi-Family Zoning Requirements for MBTA Communities

DZH22 said:
It's probably a 10-20 minute drive to the last stop on either line. From there either line is well over an hour to Boston.
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As I said before, the housing shortage isn't just a Greater Boston issue, it's a Massachusetts issue. We can't ignore the housing needs of Central Mass just because there's a lot of unmet demand for housing in Greater Boston.

DZH22 said:
So we should somehow treat them the same way we'd treat, say, Woburn, which is about a 25 minute ride?
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We aren't treating Holden the way we treat Woburn. Woburn has to zone for 2,631 units because it has a Commuter Rail station. Holden only has to zone for 750 units.
 
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themissinglink said:
Holden isn't a "small town", it's a midsize bedroom community. It has a population of ~20,000, and it's part of the Worcester Metropolitan area. Why shouldn't they be subject to this law? The housing shortage isn't just a Greater Boston issue; it's a Massachusetts issue.
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We should look at ways to stimulate more housing in places like Holden without a doubt, so long as it is near the town center and coupled with a bus to Worcester's Union Station. But I agree with DZH22 that this seems to be shoehorning a rule designed for a different purpose into a more general and widespread reform. My take on the MBTA communities act is that is is meant to stimulate TOD, not just general development in any community where people might drive to a station. We don't want people driving to stations, we want them living near stations. Holden isn't the right target for a law with a TOD purpose.

DZH22 said:
To me, keeping the forests intact serves the health of the state. I don't want to clear cut forests to put up some barely-dense housing when we should instead be telling Boston to turn their 3-6 story housing proposals into 20-50 stories. It also meets the "green" mandates better to have more housing in the already dense cities of Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, etc than to put them in far-flung suburbs. The carbon footprints per unit are much smaller in the cities. But I guess you can't have a Massachusetts law unless it's paired with wild hypocrisy.
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The largest goal for housing construction in eastern Massachusetts should be high density 15 minute neighborhoods built around transit nodes, and especially not focused on the few areas not already touched by sprawling development.
 
My goodness what a terrible article that is. They did a whole zoning process to identify places where density would work, and developers are proposing in those places - vacant lots, empty parking lots, low-rise office parks, Hartwell Avenue, but heaven forbid. 89 Bedford Street is located 0.1 miles from a medical office building and multistory retail complex at a neighborhood commercial center - on one side of it are a pair of probably 5 million dollar semi-detached mcmansions and a completely unremarkable street of ranch houses curls around the back. Yet from the way the author describes it you'd think it was replacing one whole side of the Battle Green. They also mix in a lot of photos of Hartwell to make it look like the enormous buildings there are being built all over the city.

You approved a plan to build housing, then bailed when it turned out that people wanted to build housing near you. There's a word for that... what is it...
 
Equilibria said:
They did a whole zoning process to identify places where density would work, and developers are proposing in those places - vacant lots, empty parking lots, low-rise office parks, Hartwell Avenue, but heaven forbid.
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Right - I can think of nothing more "out of character with the historic character of Lexington" than Hartwell Avenue of the last 30+ years.

Dense and walkable apartment blocks there would surely be more in line with what the founding fathers pictured than this nonsense.
 
Hey, that medical office building was the site of an old trolley barn. We can’t be destroying the memory of that…
 
Someone needs to just call these people liars. Complaints about densifying Hartwell are patently absurd. It's formally part of Lexington, but culturally it's an industrial zone across the freeway next to a freakin air force base/airport. It's basically part of Bedford, let's be honest. And for people living there and commuting into the Boston area they would need to cross several onramps before causing dreaded traffic in downtown Lexington.

There's a cruise missile firm currently on Hartwell Ave and I don't recall press or the town condemning that opening up. But apartments, now we're going to get into fights at the city council. Reminder that what these people care about is potential devaluation of their prime assets (their homes) that they have juiced by restricting any competition. Press shouldn't let them get away with it.
 
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I'd like to ask a question to all the rabid supporters of this mandate -- what do you think this will actually accomplish? Do you think it will reduce the cost of housing? Do you think it will improve our cities and towns? Make them more beautiful, and function better? Do you think it will improve the quality of life for people living here? You can't possibly believe it will do any of these things.

There are many communities that have recently embraced an increase in development in MA. One needs only to take a look at some of these communities to see that the effect that this new development is having is the exact opposite of all those things listed above -- housing costs increase; the new buildings follow low design standards, are frequently ugly and out of scale; traffic increases, infrastructure and municipal services are strained; and the quality of life goes down. This is plain to see.

Which makes your cheerleading just look like neoliberal zealotry to me. As the state's economy becomes more anemic, this just seems like a scheme to pad the GDP and make some politically connected real estate and construction interests more money in the process.
 
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Beantropolis said:
There are many communities that have recently embraced an increase in development in MA. One needs only to take a look at some of these communities to see that the effect that this new development is having is the exact opposite of all those things listed above -- housing costs increase; the new buildings follow low design standards, are frequently ugly and out of scale; traffic increases, infrastructure and municipal services are strained; and the quality of life goes down. This is plain to see.
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I'll take, like, six citations, please.
 
Beantropolis said:
I'd like to ask a question to all the rabid supporters of this mandate -- what do you think this will actually accomplish? Do you think it will reduce the cost of housing? Do you think it will improve our cities and towns? Make them more beautiful, and function better? Do you think it will improve the quality of life for people living here? You can't possibly believe it will do any of these things.

There are many communities that have recently embraced an increase in development in MA. One needs only to take a look at some of these communities to see that the effect that this new development is having is the exact opposite of all those things listed above -- housing costs increase; the new buildings follow low design standards, are frequently ugly and out of scale; traffic increases, infrastructure and municipal services are strained; and the quality of life goes down. This is plain to see.

Which makes your cheerleading just look like neoliberal zealotry to me. As the state's economy becomes more anemic, this just seems like a scheme to pad the GDP and make some politically connected real estate and construction interests more money in the process.
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Denisification of existing built up areas does come with some downsides. But what's the alternative? Build more single family homes in conservation land and stretch municipal services even further? Let home prices in Boston rise and rise until there's nobody left to work service jobs and gentrification has steamrolled everything within 495 into lifeless bedroom communities? Strictly control rents and drive out all the students that drive Boston's Biotech and Medical industries? Tell businesses that "It's time to stop growing now" and tell everybody who was hoping for a raise next year that "sucks to suck, we're all out of those"?

Or we could build more dense housing in areas well suited to it. Split single family homes in places like Newton/Brookline into duplexes, build towers on top of shopping plazas and main street businesses, remove parking minimums and convert 2-3 story semi-detached homes in Camberville or Allston into more space-efficient 3-4 story row houses, build the missing middle.
 
Beantropolis said:
You can't possibly believe it will do any of these things
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To very directly answer this: yes, I really believe it will do all these things.

I'm not a neoliberal cheerleader. I grew up in New England and will raise my family here. I care a lot about this place, its character, the quality of life, and all the intangibles. Yes, a lot of new apartments look terrible and I hate that. A lot of them look really nice, too. I want more of the nice ones.

Besides work, I play a lot of music. Most of my friends are musicians and artists. A lot of them do it as their main thing, and work odd jobs to make ends meet. I worry about rent getting to high for them and forcing them to move away. I worry about the cool bars and small venues closing up and making Mass bland and weakening communities.

I won't go one by one through your arguments, because I think you could get better arguments by googling all of your questions. All I'm trying to say is that you and I probably care about a lot of the same things and just disagree about the policies that would get there
 
Beantropolis said:
I'd like to ask a question to all the rabid supporters of this mandate -- what do you think this will actually accomplish? Do you think it will reduce the cost of housing? Do you think it will improve our cities and towns? Make them more beautiful, and function better? Do you think it will improve the quality of life for people living here? You can't possibly believe it will do any of these things.

There are many communities that have recently embraced an increase in development in MA. One needs only to take a look at some of these communities to see that the effect that this new development is having is the exact opposite of all those things listed above -- housing costs increase; the new buildings follow low design standards, are frequently ugly and out of scale; traffic increases, infrastructure and municipal services are strained; and the quality of life goes down. This is plain to see.

Which makes your cheerleading just look like neoliberal zealotry to me. As the state's economy becomes more anemic, this just seems like a scheme to pad the GDP and make some politically connected real estate and construction interests more money in the process.
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It takes a long time to plan, permit, and then construct housing here, theres only been a couple buildings that have even been built so far as a result of the law. I dont know how you can even make all these claims this early, when hardly anything has even happened yet.
 
stick n move said:
It takes a long time to plan, permit, and then construct housing here, theres only been a couple buildings that have even been built so far as a result of the law. I dont know how you can even make all these claims this early, when hardly anything has even happened yet.
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A lot of towns did the bare minimum. Districts drawn over land that already has apartments, or over sites nobody’s going to redevelop anytime soon. So even the zoning that’s “passed” won’t produce much housing in a lot of places. The whole effort might end up being a nothing-burger.
 
That point is what keeps getting glossed over: the mandate was just to zone for density. The law has no teeth to compel production. It’s a box to be ticked for people like Baker to say they have done something without actually doing the work.
 
Is anyone tracking how much new housing is actually getting built because the Act?
 
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